I'm a lifelong learner that really enjoys learning new technology, namely technologies that allow us to communicate more effectively like Adobe Premiere and After Effects. This is a learning journal that helps me archive and reflect on my growth.
After doing yesterday's tutorial on animating circles, I thought I'd look up something more specific relating to making pie charts. I came across this tutorial from ECAbrams. It was more complicated than I thought. Evan Abrams is awesome, and the tutorial was easy to follow as long as I paused occasionally to finish the expressions, but I had a hard time making sense of how he connected all the layers. Basically, I started with one wedge and linked it to a slider control. After that, I made 4 duplicates to complete the pie chart. The confusing part was mathematically linking them to each other. He walked me through how to add an expression (AKA mathematical equation) that made the next wedge start where the last one ended. This way, when the pieces of the pie animated in, they would all stick together as one continuous unit, no gaps.
While I was able to duplicate what he did, I have little concept of how to apply it. That's a bit frustrating. I haven't developed the ability to see potential connections b/t layers and effects yet. That's something TOTALLY new in After Effects that I didn't experience in Premiere. Layers and effects can tie to each other. This is overwhelming b/c there are an incredible number of effects and layers in every After Effects project, even the small ones. This only shows 60% of the layers and effects in this ONE pie chart I made.
Additionally, every parameter can be given a mathematical expression to make it happen over time, happen randomly, loop continuously, and more. For example, if you enter an expression: wiggle(10,10) on the position parameter of an object, it will wiggle ten pixels ten times per second. That's just the tip of the iceberg. The amount of base knowledge one has to acquire before really knocking out something super creative in After Effects is incredible.
A couple of things to work on:
Run through more tutorials like this so I start developing a baseline set of expressions I can apply to various situations. I know two or three, but it's not enough to do anything advanced.
Look for opportunities to pair layers to each other. Take notes during tutorials and list layers that traditionally get pick whipped (paired) together.
I've seen a lot of logos and title intros that use animations like this so I thought I'd give it a whirl (pun intended). This sweeping circles tutorial by Mikey Borup did a great job of laying out the basics. The number of keyframes in the final project looks pretty wild, but it's really a bunch of duplicates.
I set up an animation for one of the circles and then copied it to other circles. Then, all I had to do was move the copied keyframes around a bit to offset them from the other ones. That differentiated the animations enough so it didn't look like they were all moving in the same manner. How is this different than Premiere shape layers? In Premiere, you can generate shape layers, but as far as I know, you can't animate the paths (start and end), change the stroke width, easily turn a circle into a dashed line, or add a repeater to make one shape layer into ten. These are just a few of the things the tutorial covered, and I was reminded of how deep the effects panels go in After Effects.
The final animation is pretty random, but I'm happy that I took some time to play with it. Right now, I'm seeing this really useful in creation some animated lower thirds. One or two large circles like this would be a slick way to reveal some text or even a video clip. I can also see it useful for animating pie charts and other forms of data. Eventually, I'll probably start generating some title sequences with animated shape layers like this, but I'll probably start small. We'll see what opportunity comes first. One more tool added to the toolbox.
Fly by text is something I've seen before, but I've never really made it. I've tried it in Adobe Premiere, but it never turned out well. In Premiere, you can animate the scale of text to make it look like it's flying by, but there are limits to how big you can make it. In the end, you can achieve the illusion that it's flying by (just by animating scale from really large to small), but since there are limitations to scale, it's hard to sell it. In contrast, After Effects allows z-space animation, which gives projects a three dimensional feel. In Premiere, you're stuck with just x and y. When I finished with the z-space animation, it looked great. I started seeing how this animation could be applied to pictures and videos as well. Imagine a series of pictures flying by just like the text. After finishing the basic animation, I colorized it with hue effects, added a radial gradient, threw in backgrounds, added swishes, camera shake, and turned on motion blur. Click the link to the tutorial by Andrew Cramer if you're interested in learning it yourself. Coming in at nine minutes, it's shorter than most After Effects Tutorials.
